Removal of heat has become one of the most important challenging issues facing computer system designers today. As the rate of power dissipation from electronics components such as high performance server processors continues to increase, standard conduction and forced-air convection fan air cooling techniques no longer provide adequate cooling for such sophisticated electronic components. The reliability of the electronic system suffers if high temperatures at hot spot locations are permitted to persist. Conventional thermal control schemes such as air cooling with fans, thermoelectric cooling, heat pipes, and passive vapor chambers have either reached their practical application limit or are soon to become impractical for high power electronic components such as computer server processors. When standard cooling methods are no longer adequate, computer manufacturers have to reduce the frequency of their processors to match the capacity of existing cooling apparatus. Furthermore, reliability can be compromised due to inadequate cooling using an existing cooling apparatus, or product release delayed until a reliable cooling apparatus for removal of heat from high heat dissipating processors can be made available.
The computer industry is seriously considering utilizing active liquid cooling as an alternative to conventional passive air cooling for high performance and high power processors. A number of attempts to incorporate liquid for cooling of high powered processors in the form of submerged liquid, liquid spray cooling, refrigeration cooling, and the like have been attempted in the past, but none of the existing active liquid cooling solutions has been utilized outside of specific design conditions. Additionally, these cooling solutions, while effective, can include a relatively high number of moving parts that can lead to increased product and maintenance costs.
What is desired, therefore, is a field-replaceable heat sink module that employs active liquid cooling, but has the same appearance as a traditional air-cooling heat sink, is sturdy, reliable, compact, simple to use, relatively inexpensive, and can be effectively employed in a wide range of applications.